After sustaining exterior siding damage to a residence or a commercial building, a property owner typically file a claim with their insurance company. In response to these claims, the insurance company assigns an agent to investigate the claims to determine the extent of damage and to provide their clients with appropriate compensation. However, agents have had long-standing difficulties identifying the color of the damaged exterior siding, in particular, which often leads to repair delays and/or unnecessary expenses. For example, if the color of damaged siding on a home is misidentified, the incorrectly ordered (and some cases actually installed) replacement siding may not match the color of the existing siding to the satisfaction of the homeowner. In this case, the contractor may need to return the replacement siding, to reattempt identify the damage siding, and to install a new type of replacing siding that all leads to project delays and increased costs.
Correctly identifying the color of siding may be a tedious, expensive, and/or inexact process. For example, the agent typically obtains a physical sample of the siding by removing a section of damaged siding from the building by locating a section of siding on the building that is similar to the damaged siding. The agent may then physically hold different color swatch samples of existing siding products up to the siding to visually compare each color swatch to the damaged siding sample. This process of identifying the color of the siding via matching the most similar color swatch is subjective and inexact. Moreover, the agent requires costly and time intensive training to account for fading of the damaged siding as well as changing light conditions (e.g., an overcast sky, reflections from snow covered ground, etc.) Furthermore, not only is this manual color swatch identification process incredibly time consuming for the agent, but the insurance company must also maintain, update, and distribute a large inventory of color swatch samples to each agent.
Another examples of color identification of siding include the use of colorimeters, spectrometers, and spectrocolorimeters. While these color identification devices are more accurate than physically holding up color swatch samples in determining a color for a specific piece of siding, the devices are cost-prohibitive for mass adoption of agents. Moreover, even if one of these devices are utilized in determining a color, the problem of identifying a replacement siding product available in the market that most closely matches the determined color still exists.